The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has announced its 2018-19 fellows. The center, based in the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, holds one of the most extensive research libraries in the United States. The center screened nearly 400 applicants from 45 countries for the prestigious fellowships.
Amongst those chosen were David Bell, Professor and Director of the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University, whose interests lie in modern European history. Dr. Bell will complete his latest book, tentatively titled The Idols of the Age of Revolution: Charisma and Power in the Atlantic World, 1750-1830, while in residence a the center. Also from Princeton is Brooke Holmes, professor of the classics, who will spend her residency on a project on sympathy in the human and non-human worlds in Greco-Roman society. Dr. Holmes is the author of 2012’s Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy.
Martha Hodes, award-winning author of Mourning Lincoln and professor of history at New York University, will use her time in the center to write a book on the 1970 airplane hijackings that ended in three jet liners held in a week-long hostage in Jordan – an event she survived as a twelve-year-old passenger. Corey Robin, professor of political science at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, will write a biography of Clarence Thomas while in residence. He has previously written on American conservatism and neoconservatism, including The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, which recently was reissued in its second edition. A third New Yorker, Amanda Vaill, has tackled subjects like Ernest Hemmingway and Jerome Robbins in her narrative biographies. Her latest book, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War, centered on the Hotel Florida in Madrid, Spain, and the people who resided in it during the three-year armed conflict. Her time at the Cullman Center will be used to write a dual biography of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton and Angelica Schuyler Church.
For a full list of winners and their projects, see the Cullman Center’s press release.